Hey Internet Queerdos and Allies,

It's the first day of Pride month, which means there's only 29 days of corporate rainbow washing left to go!

Before we get started, here's a content warning (#CW) for some swearing, dark topics, and a lot of If that's alright with you, then let's goooo!

Okay, so it's been an interesting past year. The Cass report came out and helped roll back trans rights in some pretty serious ways, the conservative Right kept right on proving to be downright 💩 humans, there's at least one genocide threatening people's right to exist, and billionaires continued to exercise their (money-given) right to make everything worse for everyone but them. Rights have been a big topic lately.

Oh, and I almost threw myself off a bridge several months back—but we'll get to that in a moment.

Fuck. I need some rainbow-safe brain-bleach before we continue, so here are some good things that happened:

I traded in my old gender for a shiny new one (technically I just binned the old one—it was pretty outdated). Speaking of dating, I started seeing a lovely enby (hi @catsalad!) from the infosec community. All the people I do safety checks with are still here, and Trump became an official felon 🎉

Alright, that's a bit better. Now on to the actual point of this article: acceptance, community, and safety.

Those three things are right up there with staying hydrated and memes when I think about what any queer person needs to thrive.

Acceptance is a prerequisite for community. Our diversity of experience is just as important as our shared experience. Without being accepting of what makes us each unique and wonderful, our communities are fragile and prone to fracturing. You only have to look at those who try to define what a "real man" or "real woman" is to see how they draw circles around their in-group that get smaller and smaller until no one fits.

Community breeds safety. You may snap a twig with your bare hands, but bind 'em together and you'll find a fagot much harder. Members of our community support each other—and that support becomes so much more important when our queer friends and family run up against the bigotry and horrors of this world. But we're not just one community; we're an alphabet soup of people who come together under the LGBTQIA+ umbrella. Regardless of the specifics, we're the ones who weren't born with the default settings...and that's beautiful—that's worth protecting.

So what about the bridge? Well, like so many people who identify as LGBTQ+, I had a lot of trauma growing up. Trauma that I continue to collect and box up like newly caught Pokémon. There are a lot of sources of that trauma for me: tech-industry layoffs, an abusive partner, neuro-divergence, as well as non-conforming gender and sexuality in a world whose motto might as well be "Of the Default, by the Default, and for the Default".

This all came together one day after a fight with my spouse that left me in a very dark place. I didn't feel safe, I didn't feel like I really belonged to any community, and I didn't feel accepted by those closest to me.

As I stood on the bridge, I got a notification on my phone...then another. It was enough to snap me out of it for a second, and I checked my messages through the tears. Thinking back I honestly don't remember who they were from or what they said, but I do remember that they were from Mastodon, from a couple people who just happened to reach out at the exact right moment. I'll skip the rest of the details, because some of you have already heard this story and they're not really important to this article.

The important part is that I made it home in one piece because someone reached out. Someone who didn't even know how much I needed them to.

That little tie to the queer community was all it took to ground me in the moment and save my life.

Since then I've been keeping an eye out for others that might need grounding and doing my best to make sure they feel accepted. I've been welcoming as many new people into the community as I can, and I've been trying my best to be a safe space for anyone who needs it.

So, wrapping this up, I want to ask you to do the same. Not just today, but every day—as often as you can. Sometimes all it takes is showing a little kindness and compassion to make a big difference in someone's life.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go check in on some people and tell them how glad I am that they're here.

—Alice Watson 💜

#Pride #Pride2024 #LGBTQ #Community #Acceptance #Safety #Trans #MentalHealth #Outreach #Activism #Love #Welcome